Amazon S3 goes down, “office hours” unveiled

Network World has a report on the failure of Amazon.com’s S3 storage service on Sunday, while News.com notes that Amazon S3 “spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future.”

Amazon has encountered disruptions before with its Web Services offerings, which are used to power the back end computing infrastructure of hundreds of companies. And each of these outages is a direct hit to the company’s cloud computing effort.

But the company is trying to reach out to the Web community. The Amazon Web Services group has started a new program — dubbed “Office Hours” — where it will set up shop at an offsite location the last Tuesday of the month to address issues.

One possible question on the minds of entrepreneurs these days: How reliable are Amazon Web Services?

UPDATE: Speaking at a conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos addressed the outage after a question from an audience member. TechCrunch reports on Bezos’ response, which included this quote:

“When we have an outage like yesterday, we see that as a crucial driver. We won’t be satisfied until we have uptimes and availabilities that are indistinguishable from perfection.”